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Abstract
The Allgemeines Historisches Taschenbuch, oder Abriss der merkwürdigsten neuen Welt-Begebenheiten (General Historical Pocketbook, or Outline of the most remarkable new world events), published in Berlin in 1784 and supported by the Academy of Arts, contained one of the most important contemporary accounts of the North American Revolution, titled Geschichte der Revolution von Nord-Amerika (History of the North American Revolution) by Matthias Christian Sprengel, professor at Göttingen University. It further contained influential illustrations, among them twelve engravings designed by Academy member Daniel Chodowiecki, each depicting a key motif from the American struggle for independence and its outcome. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), an original copy of the pocket book with the Geschichte der Revolution has been preserved, and it is unique in that eleven drawings by Johann Heinrich Ramberg are glued in in addition to the original plates. Ramberg of Hanover was to follow Chodowiecki as the most prolific artist in German book illustration. Several of the drawings are dated 1786 or 1787, when the young Ramberg was a fellow at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, studying under the American history painter Benjamin West. These drawings are examined and published in their entirety here for the first time. An article published in Amerikastudien in 1978 first mentioned the drawings in the Metropolitan Museum and their obvious connection to the Chodowiecki prints, stating they posed a “puzzling iconographic problem” because the German artist in London appeared to change the viewpoint in at least one case. This article follows up on Jantz’s observation. It examines how Chodowiecki’s designs all show the perspective of the British or share a “neutral” outsider perspective. I argue that in nearly all cases, Ramberg moves the observer closer to the action, takes on the perspective of the Americans or one sympathetic to them, shows more emotion and movement than Chodowiecki, and thus invites an emotional reaction from the viewer. The question of whether Ramberg planned publication, though, remains unanswered.
Acknowledgments
Photography of the drawings was done by ART RESOURCE, NY.
Notes
1 Alexander Kosenina, ed., Literatur—Bilder: Johann Heinrich Ramberg als Buchillustrator der Goethezeit (Hanover: Wehrhahn, 2013); Johann Heinrich Ramberg and Dietrich Wilhelm Soltau, Reineke Fuchs. 31 Originalzeichnungen und neu kolorierte Radierungen mit Ausschnitten aus der Übersetzung des Epos von D. W. Soltau in Knittelversen / Reynard the Fox. 31 Original Drawings and Newly Colored Etchings with Excerpts from the English Translation of the Burlesque Poem by Soltau, parallel edn ed. Waltraud Maierhofer (Weimar: VDG, 2016); Johann Heinrich Ramberg, Karikatur in der Goethezeit. Die Bildergeschichte “Leben Strunks des Emporkömmlings.” 25 Originalzeichnungen mit Kommentar, ed. Waltraud Maierhofer (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2019); Johann Heinrich Ramberg, Wielands “Oberon”, ed. Peter-Henning Haischer and Alexander Rosenbaum, 2 vols. (Heidelberg: Winter, 2022). Further, there is a digital database in progress for illustrations by or after Ramberg and illustrated works: Johann Heinrich Ramberg als Almanach- und Buchillustrator / J. H. Ramberg as Illustrator of Books and Almanacs, compiled and ed. Waltraud Maierhofer (University of Iowa Libraries, 2019–present), http://rambergillustrations.lib.uiowa.edu (accessed on March 25, 2023).
2 A planned book on Ramberg as intercultural artist edited by Peter-Henning Haischer and myself (Hannover: Wehrhahn) will examine this exchange.
3 Troy Bickham, Making Headlines: The American Revolution as Seen through the British Press (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). For the construction of national identities during the American Revolution and their satirical depiction on the British print market, see Britta Mischek, Die Konstruktion nationaler Identitäten in der englischen politisch-satirischen Druckgrafik zur Amerikanischen Revolution 1763–1783 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2008).
4 Frank Becker, “The American Revolution as a European Media Event,” European History Online (September 30, 2011), http://ieg-ego.eu/threads/american-revolution (accessed on March 25, 2023).
5 Ibid., sect. 27.
6 Allgemeines historisches Taschenbuch, oder Abriss der merkwürdigsten neuen Welt-Begebenheiten: enthaltend für 1784 die Geschichte der Revolution von Nord-America von M. C. Sprengel […]. Mit 18 Kupfern und einer illuminirt. Landcharte. Jahrbuch der merkwürdigsten neuen Weltbegebenheiten für 1784 (General Historical Pocketbook, or Outline of the Most Noteworthy New World Events: Containing for 1784 the History of the Revolution in North America. With 18 Engravings and a Colored Map) (Berlin: Haude & Spener, [1784]) (henceforth AhT). The publication date is occasionally cited as 1783, as almanacs were usually printed in time for the book fair towards the end of preceding year to which the volume was dedicated. However, the first engraving after Chodowiecki is dated as engraved in 1784 (see below). It is therefore likely that the printing did not happen before early 1784. There are several scans of the AhT available online, e.g., National Library Vienna—ÖNB), https://onb.digital/result/1002DE97 (accessed on March 25, 2023). All the engravings are included. The first is inscribed, “D. Chodowiecki inv[enit] et del[ineat] D. Berger sculpsit. 1784.” (as shown in ). The scan on Archive (copy Boston Public Library) is missing the engravings after Chodowiecki, but does have the map and the appendix plates, https://archive.org/details/allgemeineshisto00spre/mode/1up (accessed on March 25, 2023).
7 Bauer’s catalogue of Chodowiecki’s printed works shows all twelve original plates with the signature on the first plate, “D. Chodowiecki del. et sculp.”, showing the artist invented, designed, and engraved the series; Jens-Heiner Bauer, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki. Danzig 1726–1801 Berlin. Das druckgraphische Werk (Hanover: Verlag Galerie J. H. Bauer, 1984), 156.
8 Sprengel, Allgemeines historisches Taschenbuch, [1784]; extra-illustrated volume. Book 7.8 × 5.4 × 2.2 cm. Bequest of Charles Allen Munn, inv. no. 24.90.1865, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; a description is in the online collection, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/356036 (accessed on March 25, 2023) (henceforth AhT Metmuseum). Since I ordered photography of the drawings through Art Resource, the entry also offers previews of the eleven drawings by Ramberg (size stated as 11.8 × 7.0 cm). Previously, only three drawings were shown on the webpage, namely those of the Boston Tea Party, the Battle at Lexington, and the Declaration of Independence. No related studies, drawings, or prints are extant in the State Museum of Lower Saxony in Hanover, Germany, which has the largest collection of works by Ramberg.
9 See the description in AhT Metmuseum. Munn, the donor, whose collection includes several statues of Washington and a sizable number of prints about the Revolution, took over the publishing house Munn & Company from his father, Orson Desaix Munn (1824–1907).
10 Harold Jantz, “German Views of the American Revolution: Some Recovered Sources,” Amerikastudien 23 (1978): 5–18, at 16.
11 Matthias Christian Sprengel, Vom Ursprung des Negerhandels. Ein Antrittsprogramm (On the origin of the trade of Black people) (Halle/Saale: J. C. Hendel, 1779). For a biographical overview, see Friedrich Ratzel, “Sprengel, Matthias Christian,” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB), vol. 35 of 56 vols. (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1893), 35: 299–300.
12 Paul Staiti, Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution through Painters’ Eyes (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 127.
13 Catriona MacLeod, “The German Romantic Reading Public: Taschenbücher and Other Illustrated Books,” in The Enchanted World of German Romantic Prints 1770–1850, ed. John Ittmann (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2017), 198–207.
14 Matthias Christian Sprengel, Geschichte der Revolution von Nord-Amerika. Mit einer illuminirten Charte (History of the Revolution of North America. With a Colored Map) (Speyer: bei der typographischen Gesellschaft, 1785). More reprints followed by the publisher Gegel in Frankenthal in 1785 and 1788. A map of the East Coast of North America with text in French is also found at the end of the pocketbook in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is engraved by Daniel Friedrich Sotzmann (1754–1840), based on a British map by William Faden the Younger (1749–1836), and was printed by Haude & Spener in Berlin.
15 It was preceded, for example, by Matthias Christian Sprengel, Geschichte der Europäer in Nordamerika (History of the Europeans in North America), 2 vols (Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1782); idem, Über den jetzigen Nordamerikanischen Krieg und dessen Folgen für England und Franckreich [sic] (On the Current North American War and its Consequences for England and France) (Leipzig: Weygandsche Buchhandlung, 1782).
16 Matthias Christian Sprengel, 1700s in America. Historical Genealogical Calendar, or, Yearbook of the Most Noteworthy Recent Worldwide Events, trans. Heinz Dutt and Karin Dutt (Cape Girardeau: Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2004). No contemporary English translation has been identified. However, Sprengel included British scholars in his book series, Allgemeine Welthistorie durch eine Gesellschaft von Gelehrten in Teutschland und Engeland ausgefertigt (General World History Completed by a Society of Scholars in Germany and England) (1785–89); it grew to seventy-six volumes and included translations, for example, of works by the Scottish writer William Guthrie (1708–70).
17 Bob Keatley, “Introduction to the Translation,” in Sprengel, 1700s in America, 14–28, at 15.
18 Sprengel, 1700s in America, 55.
19 Chunjie Zhang, “Matthias Christian Sprengel (1746–1803). Slavery, the American Revolution, and Historiography as Radical Enlightenment,” in The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective, ed. Carl Niekerk. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 195 (Amsterdam: Brill, 2018), 163–83.
20 For example, Hans Jakob Meier, Die Buchillustration des 18. Jahrhunders in Deutschland und die Auflösung des überlieferten Historienbildes (Book Illustration in the 18th Century and the Dissolution of the Traditional Image of History) (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994), 77. The title of the pocket book was revised from the first volume to Historisch-genealogischer Calender oder Jahrbuch der merkwürdigsten neuen Welt-Begebenheiten für 1789 (Historical–Genealogical Almanac, or Yearbook of the Most Noteworthy New World Events).
21 Jantz, “German Views of the American Revolution,” 16.
22 Benjamin L. Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), cover and ill. 1; Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 82.
23 For an excellent overview of current scholarship, see Christina Ionescu, “Introduction: Towards a Reconfiguration of the Visual Periphery of the Text in the Eighteenth-Century Illustrated Book,” in Book Illustration in the Long Eighteenth Century: Reconfiguring the Visual Periphery of the Text, ed. Christina Ionescu (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2015), 1–50.
24 Bauer, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, nos. 1054–65 (in the following abbreviated as “Ba” and number). This catalogue is supplemented by a volume of commentary: Elisabeth Wormsbächer and Jens-Heiner Bauer, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki. Erklärungen und Erläuterungen zu seinen Radierungen (Hanover: Galerie Bauer, 1988), 107–8.
25 “Charles Spener to John Adams, 28 February 1784,” Founders Online, The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-16-02-0042 (accessed on March 25, 2023); original source: The Adams Papers: Papers of John Adams, 20 vols., Vol. 16: February 1784–March 1785, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Robert Karachuk, Hobson Woodward, Margaret A. Hogan, Sara B. Sikes, Sara Martin, Sara Georgini, Amanda A. Mathews, and James T. Connolly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 67–70. Adams answered on March 24, 1784; Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-16-02-0057 (accessed on March 25, 2023).
26 “Charles Spener to John Adams, 28 February 1784”; see also The Adams Papers, 16: 22–24; the commentary confirms that Chodowiecki’s designs showed ignorance of American conditions.
27 The said portrait was from Michel René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques et politiques sur les Anglo-Américains (Historical and Political Essays on Anglo-Americans), 2 vols (Brussels: author, 1781–82). The publication also contained engravings of other key scenes, such as “Premiere Assemblée du Congrès” (The First Assembly of the Continental Congress) by François Godefroy, or “Incendie de New-York” (The New York Fire). The latter motif is mentioned in the almanac as not in the serious, less sensationalist German taste (AhT, 163).
28 Edward Barnard, The New, Impartial and Complete History of England: From the Very Earliest Period of Authentic Information, to the End of the Present Year (London: Alexander Hogg, 1791), before 689, before 687, after 694, after 696; Archive.org, https://archive.org/details/b30450020/page/715/mode/1up (accessed on March 25, 2023).
29 Bickham, Making Headlines, 253.
30 See AhT Metmuseum.
31 The translations are the author’s own, taking into consideration the version provided in Kurt Rabl, Christoph Soll, and Manfred Vasold, eds, From the U.S. Constitution to the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany: A Survey with 241 Documents, Illustrations and Plates / Von der amerikanischen Verfassung zum Grundgesetz der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Eine Zusammenschau mit 241 Dokumenten und Abbildungen im Text und auf Tafeln (Gräfelfing: Moos, 1988), 32–33.
32 The engravings by Berger, for example, in the collection “Daniel Chodowiecki: Twelve Scenes from the American Revolution,” Brown University Library, Instructional Image Collection, https://jcb.lunaimaging.com/luna (both accessed on March 25, 2023). The engravings by Berger are also in the Library of Congress, cut apart (each 10.3 × 6.0 cm or smaller) and arranged in their original order and mounted on two sheets with a single backing (50.8 × 61.0 cm), https://www.loc.gov/resource/ppmsca.19465/ (accessed on March 25, 2023). The series was included in The American Revolution in Drawings and Prints; A Checklist of 1765–1790 Graphics in the Library of Congress, compiled by Donald H. Cresswell, foreword by Sinclair H. Hitchings (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1975).
33 Here and for the following prints, the historical summaries follow Wormsbächer, Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, 107–8, and collate the respective pages in AhT.
34 Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 22–24. A detail of Chodowiecki’s print also adorns the cover of the book.
35 Bickham, Making Headlines, 115, 175.
36 See AhT, n. p. (last two plates in the appendix).
37 “Charles Spener to John Adams, 28 February 1784.”
38 John Trumbull, “First Idea of Declaration of Independence,” September 1786. Drawing in graphite pen and brown ink (by Thomas Jefferson). 17.6 × 23.0 cm. New Haven, Yale University Art Galleries, Acc. no 1926.8.1-.2, https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/2805 (accessed on March 25, 2023); Helen A. Cooper, John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1982), 79, pl. 26.
39 For details on the Georgian “Court as a Stage,” see the respective section in Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World, exh. cat. ed. Joanna Marshner, Lisa L. Ford, and David Bindman (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 163–215.
40 This and the following engraving are numbered chronologically, while Sprengel’s account first narrates the events of Yorktown of 1781.
41 The inscription continues: “(Adjutant General to the English Army) at Head Quarters in New York. Oct.r 2, 1780, who was found within the American Lines in the character of a Spy.” (original emphasis). It is signed “Hamilton delin. Goldar sculp.”, conveying the engraver as John Goldar (1729–95) after a drawing by Hamilton. The copper plate engraving (plate 31.0 × 20.5 cm, page 38.0 × 22.0 cm) appears to have been available with coloring; see the reproduction posted by John Goldar (without information on the holding) on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_André#/media/File:Major_John_André01.jpg (accessed on March 25, 2023).
42 This work by Ramberg is mentioned (erroneously as an engraving) as one of several “Yorktown surrender scenes that flooded the European market in the 1780s” in Robert A. Selig, “The Iconography of Triumph and Surrender. Yorktown, Virginia, 19 October 1781,” Colonial Williamsburg: The Journal of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation 22, no. 3 (2000): 72–77, at 75. It is not cited or analyzed, though. This drawing is the only one of Ramberg’s series previously published in print. It also served as an illustration of the Yorktown surrender in the 1981 edition of the history book by John Morton Blum, The National Experience: A History of the United States, 5th ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 119.
43 Research on boy soldiers has shown that drummer boys were as young as eleven years old; Caroline Cox, Boy Soldiers of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 49, 154.
44 “The Surrender of Earl Cornwallis …” (an engraving by Thornton after Hamilton), in Barnard, The New, Impartial and Complete History of England, after 696.
45 Ramberg’s Shakespeare illustrations will be the subject of Stuart Sillars’ chapter in the forthcoming book on Ramberg; see note 2. See The Works (Plays) of Shakespeare: Bell's Edition, 13 vols (London: John Bell, 1785–87); [Titus Flavius Josephus], The Genuine and Complete Works of Flavius Josephus, the Celebrated War-like, Learned, and Authentic Jewish Historian: Containing […]. Translated by George Henry Maynard. Illustrated with marginal references […] by the Rev. Edward Kimpton, Vicar of Rogate in Sussex. Embellished with a great Number of beautiful Copper Plates, descriptive of the most distinguished Transactions related in the Work, from original Drawings of the ingenious Messrs. Metz, Stothard, and Corbould, Members of the Royal Academy, and other eminent Artists […] (London: J. Cooke, 1785–86); for the digital copy, see the Bavarian State Library, Munich, https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_genuine_and_complete_works/MNZCAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=The+Genuine+and+Complete+Works+of++josephus+flavius+1785&printsec=frontcover (accessed on March 25, 2023). It was customary for this kind of illustration to be published in parallel with the books, for collectors and readers to buy separately and possibly have bound with the respective volumes.
46 Staiti, Of Arms and Artists, 75–76. Staiti cites a letter by West to Charles Willson Peale dated August 4, 1783.
47 Staiti, Of Arms and Artists, 9. For a detailed analysis of “John Trumbull’s Martyrs” and “John Trumbull’s Second Act,” see the two respective chapters in ibid., 161–98, 273–96.
48 Ibid., 200, 217.
49 In 1784, the pro-American publisher John Stockdale (1750–1814) published a history of the American Revolution up to 1774 written by John Adams: John Adams, History of the Dispute with America: From Its Origin in 1754. Written in the Year 1774 (London: John Stockdale, 1784).
50 See note 13.
51 Alexander Knirim, “German Almanacs in 18th-Century North America,” event video and text, November 30, 2017, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-8219/ (accessed on March 25, 2023).
52 Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris, “Introduction,” in Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Mark L. Kamrath and Sharon M. Harris (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), 1–22, at 7; in the same volume, see also W. M. Verhoeven, “‘A Colony of Aliens’: German and the German-Language Press in Colonial and Revolutionary Pennsylvania,” 75–102.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Waltraud Maierhofer
Waltraud Maierhofer is Professor of German and an affiliated faculty member in Global Health Studies at the University of Iowa (Iowa City). She has published widely on German literature and culture since the eighteenth century, with a major focus on Goethe and narrative prose. Book illustration in the Age of Goethe is one of her recent research areas. She has edited primary sources such as Goethe’s translation of the opera libretto Circe, correspondence by the painter Angelica Kauffmann, drawing and engravings of Johann Heinrich Ramberg’s Reynard the Fox cycle, with text excerpts by Dietrich Wilhelm Soltau in German and his own English translation, as well as Ramberg’s picture story of the upstart Strunk, an important caricature pre-1848. In the research area of historical fiction and witchcraft studies, she edited several German-language works in English translation, including Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Devil in Boston, Eveline Hasler’s Anna Goeldin—Last Witch, as well as The Child Witches of Lucerne and Buchau, also by Hasler. Her recent research and teaching interests include reproductive rights issues and disabilities in German and other writing and film around the world. She co-edited Reproductive Right Issues in Popular Media: International Perspectives (2017). From 2015 to 2018 she was co-editor of Feminist German Studies (formerly Women in German Yearbook). Her research on the representation of historical women and femininity in historical narratives about the Thirty Years’ War (Hexen—Huren—Heldenweiber, 2005) as well as several other projects have been supported by the Alexander-von-Humboldt foundation.